"I've killed it," he would say, "and it probably loves its home."
Then, if not too badly damaged, he would re-plant it, and by these delays our progress was rather slow.
Just before we got to the brawling little river that my master loved because it talked so sociably to its big brown stones as it dashed over them, we came to Poor Dog's Pool, so named on account of a favourite setter of the Devering children who had once fallen in there in a fit and drowned.
"The setter is happy now," said Dallas as he looked thoughtfully into the depths of the velvety pool set in its bed of ferns. "He will never drown again, and he is waiting for the children."
Then he repeated to me in his sweet ringing voice a favourite poem of his cousins' written by a young Irish-Canadian friend of theirs called Norah Holland.[1]
"High up in the courts of Heaven to-day,
A little dog-angel waits.
With the other angels he will not play,
But he sits alone at the gates;
'For I know that my master will come,' says he,